Diarmuid Gavin: The Waterford gardener who became one of the 19th century's most influential horticulturalists

Irish Independent

2 days ago

William Robinson, who rose from humble beginnings, transformed the way we think about gardens and reshaped the English landscape
In the quiet countryside near Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, a boy was born in 1838 who would go on to transform the way the world thought about gardens. William Robinson was not born to privilege, and yet he became one of the most influential horticulturists in history — an Irishman who reshaped the English landscape, one perennial at a time.
Robinson's early life was rooted in toil. As a teenager, he worked as a garden boy at Curraghmore, the grand estate of the Marquess of Waterford.
From dawn to dusk, he maintained the elaborate, high-maintenance plantings that were the height of Victorian fashion — exotic hothouse flowers, regimented bedding schemes and manicured formality.
But even then, he felt something was wrong. Nature, as he saw it, wasn't meant to be clipped into submission.
By his early twenties, Robinson had risen to manage the hothouses at Ballykilcavan in Co Laois. Then came the rupture. According to one enduring story, he stormed out after a row with his employers and left the hothouse fires to die overnight — killing an entire collection of delicate tropical plants. Whether fact or folklore, the tale hints at the fierce independence that would define his career.
He sailed for London and by 1861 had secured a post at the Royal Botanic Society's gardens in Regent's Park. There, surrounded by the spectacle of Empire and the extremes of Victorian horticulture, Robinson's vision sharpened.
He hated what he saw: endless rows of red salvias, blue lobelias and elaborate carpet bedding — all costly, artificial and ephemeral. Gardening, he believed, had lost its soul.
So, he picked up his pen and began to fight back. Robinson started writing for The Gardeners' Chronicle, and then began publishing books with force and flair.
In 1870, he released The Wild Garden, a revolutionary manifesto calling for a new kind of planting, one that embraced native and naturalised plants, hardy perennials, wildflowers and the beauty of ecological balance. Let daffodils spread in meadows, he said. Let ferns and foxgloves flourish in dappled woods.
Three years later, he launched The Garden, a weekly magazine that became his mouthpiece for the next 40 years. It wasn't just a gardening journal — it was a battlefield.
Robinson used its pages to champion fellow naturalists, challenge powerful institutions like the Royal Horticultural Society and skewer his rivals. He was sharp-tongued and opinionated, but his ideas were catching on.
One of his most fruitful alliances was with Gertrude Jekyll, a painter-turned-gardener with an eye for colour and form. Robinson supported her when others dismissed her as too feminine or whimsical. Together, they shaped the Arts and Crafts movement in gardening, a gentler, more human vision of landscape.
Robinson's writing reached a crescendo in 1883 with the publication of The English Flower Garden. It became one of the best-selling gardening books of all time. Structured as an encyclopaedia of plants suitable for different garden types, it was also a deeply passionate call for change.
He urged gardeners to abandon labour-intensive, seasonal planting and embrace resilient, long-lived and ecologically harmonious gardens. In effect, he gave ordinary people permission to garden with freedom and instinct.
Flush with success, he bought Gravetye Manor in Sussex in 1884, a semi-ruined Elizabethan house with more than 1,000 acres. There, Robinson planted wild bulbs by the thousand, created orchard meadows, and filled his borders with drifting perennials. He lived there until his death in 1935 at the age of 96. He had no children, but his ideas survived him.
Today, Robinson's legacy is everywhere — in modern naturalistic planting, in the return to meadows and no-mow lawns, in the rise of pollinator gardens and climate-conscious design. Designers like Piet Oudolf, Beth Chatto and Dan Pearson all walk in his footsteps.
Even the Royal Horticultural Society, once a target of his ire, honoured him by renaming their journal The Garden in 1975. For Robinson — this feisty, self-taught gardener from Co Waterford — had redefined the English garden.
So if you ever feel the urge to stop pruning and simply let things grow, you're not being lazy. You're doing what William Robinson did — trusting the land and letting the wild back in.
Plant of the week
Allium
Ornamental onions are very cheerful plants that pop up their perfectly spherical heads in May and June. 'Purple Sensation' is a reliable choice with a rich colour. For something more dramatic, try 'Globemaster' which has giant lilac heads.
If you prefer white, 'Mount Everest' is a good performer. My own favourite is 'Christophii', star of Persia, a globe of beautiful starry violet flowers with almost a metallic hint to them. Plant in autumn in a sunny spot in fertile well drained soil or add some grit to heavy clay soil.
Reader Q&A
Can you grow wisteria from seed? I have a wisteria which produced lots of seed pods last year and was hoping to grow some more but nothing happened.
There's a much easier way to propagate wisteria — it's called layering. You do this by bending a long pliable stem that will reach the ground. Where the stem touches the ground, gently wound the stem by rubbing with a knife and now bury this part in the soil — if necessary, use a bit of wire bent to keep it in place. This will form its own root system while still attached to the mother plant. Next spring, you will be able to dig it up as a separate plant and pot up or plant elsewhere.